In this section I will explain the need for various types of things in order for your Site to get a high SERP, be Properly SEO’ed.

There are many things that go into the design and operation of a website that can get you higher in the search engines quicker.  There are many dangers to also avoid that can get you banned from the search engines, which unfortunately is very difficult to overcome.  You can plead with the computers at Google all you want, your not likely to get to a real person unless you know someone who works there.

There are many different elements which need to be considered when designing your website.  What your products are, what kinds of customers your looking for, eye candy as I like to call it (curb/store front appeal in bricks and mortar stores), and many other things that you can do that will attract customers to your site, and the search engines as well.

The design of your site not only the look for your customers but the elements it contains for the search engines.  Your marketing to two groups, one your customers are more stable, the other the search engines are not.

It is things like this that I will further discuss in this section of this site.  If you have any questions about the terms I use be sure to check the terms dictionary as I try to explain the various things.  Many times I will take a term and make a link to it in the Terms Dictionary as I did earlier for SEO and SERP.

Sparky

In the words of my friend and mentor Jere’ CONTENT IS KING, the more words the better, at least 250 per page, search engines read text they can not see pictures no matter how nice they are.  Now that being said, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t jazz your site up with graphics and other things, but you have to do it so that the search engines recognize them as CONTENT elements to the page.

The better your content the more likely you are to be recognized as an important site. As amazing as it may seem, search engines are a sort of artificial intellegnce.  They can read, they can tell when you repeat yourself, they can tell when your words make no sense, they can even spell.  Case in point: Coffee-n-Caffeine, my coffee website.  For a period of time I was curious why I was getting so many hits for the word Caffiene (a mispelling of Caffeine).  Eventually I tracked it down in MSN’s search engine and an accidential misspelling I had made myself in the Home Page.  A single misspelled word, put my site in the Number 1 Position on all the search engines when you searched with a misspelled Caffiene.  Obviously many people misspell things, however now you notice that if you search and misspell a word the search engine offers you alternatives with the correct spelling.  So it is not as successful a technique as it was before.  However, if your site is selling something that people could misspell putting the common misspelling in your site could put you in a number 1 position that others missed.

Sparky

Offering lots of content is important.  Did I mention CONTENT IS KING?  Yea I think I did but you will hear me harp on it again and again as it is one of the MOST important things to search engine marketing. The more content in the form of text, alt tags and other html coding, the more important your page will rank (PR).  For information about PR I like to use other software that is available to track PR, not only across Google, but other SE’s as well.  We will get into this later.

So your design elements must incorporate not only Eye Candy for your customers but also a means for the SE’s to read your site.  Many sites use a data base program to make the pages from information they put into the data base.  A sample of this would be Harmony Cedar , their site runs on software on a computer server that offers up ever changing information.  This site also runs on a Data base where my text and what I have highlighted or made a link to is stored and when your looking at a page it is what the data base is offering.  Data base run sites can be cheap like this one, or very expensive like Harmony Cedar.

Most sites that I manage or create are made up of what we call static pages.  These are pages of HTML code that once placed on the internet shows what you see when you click to a site and view it in your web browser.  They are inexpensive to create, and maintain or make changes too.

Most people do not need to learn HTML code in order to open up a site.  Depending on your site, your host etc.. you may get software that will help you create your site.  You can use some Word Processing software to creat HTML pages from what you create in a word document.  However the best form is to create the pages from scratch or using some sort of template which content the very basic elements needed.

The Basic elements of a webpage needed in a site is: CONTENT, A Menu, A Header, and a Footer.  Almost every website page you look at contain thise 4 elements.  Obviously the Header is at the top, the Footer is at the bottom, where the content is viewable and the menu’s are located is entirely up to you and your particular tastes, or better yet the tastes of your customers.  Essentially you have 3 places where you can put your Menu, at the top of the page, along the left or along the right.  No one puts their menu at the bottom, though in the footer we do put links to other pages that are important to have on every page.

There are other types of files which we will get into later that are also very helpful to a website, like a sitemap, robots file, and other things.

So now you know the basic design elements that are needed.

Before you go to much further you need to look at the top 10 sites on each of the big search engines.  In most cases you will find many of the same sites, but you should see at least 20 different sites between Google, Yahoo, and MSN.  Time to really look at these sites.  What makes those pages show up first?  Are they content rich or eye candy rich? Are they the big boys of the industry?  All of the sites should have common elements.  Those common element are what makes them a top site.  Go through the sites.  If you need to look at the source code for the page. The all have elements that make them top, what they have done is what needs to be done to make you a top site.

In most cases you will easily see the common elements.  Usually it’s because they are the Big Boys of the industry who get mentioned in news papers, or other media out lets.  We will get into the value of getting links from important sites as a method of gaining popularity and importance for the search engines.

If you have the money there are companies like mine that can for a fee examine the top sites track information about them and report back to you the common elements we think are making them a top search site.

The barest and most basic of all websites is a file that ends in .html (there are other types of file endings but for simplicity we will consider them all the be html files) .  What is contained within these files  is what a serving website sends to your browser when you click a link to a page.  All the information that is presented, links to other pages, graphics that show up and where are all controlled by the Code that is put into these pages. How the code is put into the page determines how the information is shown to the viewer and also crawled by the SE’s.

All web pages contain a variety of things, For details on HTML code you can check with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortiom) for the current standards they set forth. For me to go into all the various tags here would take a whole section.  I will focus on the most necessary elements, and the ones to avoid or use in other ways.

Meta Description is a tag that describes your page to the search engine.  It needs to be unique among the many pages of the site. This can be in a minor form for example my Flavored Coffee pages on my Coffee-n-Caffeine site each have the name of the flavored coffee contained within the description of the Meta Description tag.  This tells the SE’s that this page contains….  Fuzzy Navel Flavored Coffee as an example.   Description tags should contain at least 100 characters in the form of words that make sense.  Example “Coffee-n-Caffeine offering Fuzzy Navel Flavored Coffee, 100% Gourmet Flavored Coffee, Fuzzy Navel, Blends, Fair Trade Organic, Caffeine, Retail, wholesale“

Meta Keywords – This is where you put in key words not only for your site but also for the page as well.  Most of the SE’s like to see differences in these tags as well. So using the same tag line throughout the site is not a good thing.  It will not hurt you but it is better to have each of them being slightly different.  Key words or phrases are important as combined with the other meta tags it helps the SE’s properly index your site for what you think is important on the site.  Example “Fuzzy Navel Flavored Coffee, Coffee-n-Caffeine, Coffeecaffeine.com, Gourmet Food, Gourmet Coffee, Coffee, Coffee Beans, Coffee Gift, Caffeine, Coffee Information, Organic coffee, Fair Trade coffee, Earth Friendly, Free Coffee, Online Ordering, Kosher Coffee“.  Again long enough and with the changing of the name of the coffee and some other changes throughout the various pages, you can gain an advantage.

The other tags that are good but not as important are the following

doc-class content=“Living Document” this tells the SE’s that this page changes.

meta name=“author” content=“author name” Tells the SE’s who wrote the page… not very important.

meta name=“robots” content=“index, follow” this tells the SE’s that they should follow the links on the page and read the page. Not important if it’s missing, but better to have it there.

meta name=“revisit-after” content=“1 Week” this tells the SE’s how often they should return. Rest assured that even with a 1 week return if you follow the other things I point out in this section you will be indexed more than several times per day.

meta name=“language” content=“EN” This tells the SE’s what your language is so that it knows how to read your site. Believe it or not the SE’s can read most all languages.

meta name=“copyright” content=“Copyright holder” this is basically a tag that says the content is yours and you have the copyright.  Not important but you should use it.

meta name=“rating” content=“kids” -  this one shoud be adjusted depending on what rating the site is.  If it is an adult site then it should be changed it helps the SE’s and also the Parental Filters that are being used.

These tags will help your site get better results from the SE’s.

Sparky

Graphics – Graphcs are meaningless except for the file name, and any alt tags that are added to the html code that puts the graphic on the page.  File names are important. A graphic labeled icon1.jpg is not going to be indexed by the SE’s very well.  Now a graphic with a name of Band-Schedule.jpg is going to be read by the SE’s.  Add to that an alt tag in the code that says Click here to see the Bands Current Schedule of upcoming shows, and you have added readable content by the SE’s that help your site.

Java Script – Java script is meaningless and in many cases can halt SE’s dead in their tracks.  If you need to use Java it is best to have it in a separate file and use an include or some other means of bringing the script into the code of the page.

Style Information – many people, and software, put style information in the page.  This is code that tells the browser how to show various things on a page.  This information again is better used in an external file that is called upon by the page in it’s code so that it doesn’t confuse the SE’s

Outdated Code – there are updates made to the code that is used to create websites.  It is important to try to remain as close to W3C Complaint in your code as you can.  No site is perfect, but the better you are the better you show up.  This is dual effective.  First is that the customers will all generally see the page the same way regardless of the kind of browser or computer they are using.  Second is that it shows the SE’s that your using proper code in your site.

Frames - frames are an old way of trying to control where things show up on a page.  While the code is still valid, it isn’t easy for SE’s to see your site properly. It is far superior to use tables and nest them together to get control over the content, and the look will be the same, but the SE’s will read it better.

Those are just a few of the Don’ts that you should avoid in your website design.

Sparky